18000 Dead In Gordon Head
| 18,000 Dead In Gordon Head | |
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| Directed by | Clive Holden |
| Written by | Clive Holden |
| Distributed by | Triple J |
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Release date
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Running time
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13 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
18,000 Dead In Gordon Head (2001) is a 13 minute, short film by Canadian film-maker Clive Holden, based on an actual murder he witnessed while visiting his hometown in Victoria, British Columbia.
The film was part of Holden's Trains of Winnipeg series.
On a quiet, suburban street in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and in the middle of the afternoon on a summer's day in 1982, Clive Holden witnessed the murder of a teenaged girl as she was killed by a sniper's bullet. A year later, Holden returned to the scene of the senseless slaying to lie with his camera on the spot where she died, in order to film and capture the effect of her tragic and sudden death.
The film is so titled in reference to the statistic that the average sixteen-year-old has already witnessed 18,000 murders, on television and at the movies. The locale of Gordon Head is the Canadian suburb where the murder happened, and where the film thus takes place.
The original footage for the film project was shot on Super 8 film; however, this footage was lost before it could be edited. Twenty years later, a crude VHS video dub of the original project was found. Much of the footage was damaged footage and out of sync, with but still managed to remain evocative of the filmmaker's hazy and murky memories of the original event at Gordon Head. The footage inspired Holden to write a narrative poem of the event and thus formed the basis of the completed 35mm film.
"Composed as a poem, it's a hybrid of several film stocks and video formats, digitally processed to create a violent, yet lyrical, collage of textured loops, internal rhythms and visual rhymes, finally completing the work's cycle back to film."
As horrifying and remarkable as the girl's sudden murder by the sniper was, the young filmmaker also found it devastatingly normal, and this bothered him to no end. As the film suggests, Holden had "already seen it, thousands of times." He felt desensitized and numb to it all. The film details an ensuing series of violent events that Holden went on to witness, and he remained numb, until a small, positive action broke his hazy spell.
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